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Data. Together. Let's read about it (Syllabus)
====
We want to understand better just what it is that we're doing! The goal of this "syllabus" is to identify some key themes that drive Data Together as a project & as a politics, and to find some readings that help us understand those themes better.
# Structure
We're imagining that we'll take one of our weekly meetings every month and turn it into a discussion of one of the themes. Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to facilitate discussion, which involves identifying some discussion questions & doing some further background reading.
1.5 hr conversation
Tuesdays 15:30-17:00 ET
Per session:
- Facilitator (Guiding frame: what should we care about here)
- 1-2 volunteers for an additional reading
Outcomes:
- We learn together!
- Document from discussion, with an eye to
- Feeding out DT Principles
- Larger life? Mozilla Open Leaders! Community Research DAT and IPFS together? Decentralized Web Summit?
# Themes
## What is the decentralized web? (Decentralized, Distributed) (June 26)
Just getting us all on the same page about this very, er, central question, and also working through distinctions between similar temrs (esp decentralized, distributed, federated, p2p).
- Brewster Kahle:
- [Locking the Web Open, a Call for a Distributed Web](http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/04/22/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web/)
- [Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web (longer form)](http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/)
- [André Staltz "The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here's How"](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html)
- [Baran, P. (1964). _On Distributed Communication Networks_ (No. RM-4230-PR). Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html)
## Ownership (July 24)
Sometimes when we talk about DT we use phrases like "communities taking ownership of their data". What do we mean, and why is this language important to us? How should we think about "ownership" as a value, and in what ways are individual and collective ownership different from each other?
- Something from 'Ours to hack and ours to own' Scholz
- HOW PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM CAN UNLEASH THE NETWORK - TREBOR SCHOLZ (Clearest overview)
- [COUNTERANTI- DISINTERMEDIATION](http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation) - DMYTRI KLEINER?
- THE MEANINGS OF WORDS - NATHAN SCHNEIDER? (focused on democracy)
- [Albrechtslund. "Negotiating ownership and agency in social media: Community reactions to Amazon's acquisition of GoodReads"](http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7095/6161)
## Commons (August 21)
Sometimes, instead of ownership, we talk about a "commons". How ought the commons to be governed, and by whom?
- Ostrom, _Governing the Commons_ Chapter 1 and/or Chapter 2
- Linebaugh, "Enclosures from the Bottom Up,"_Stop, Thief!_ Chapter 9
- De Filippi, P., & Tréguer, F. (2015). Expanding the Internet commons: The subversive potential of wireless community networks.
## Centralization vs. Decentralization (and Peer-to-peer, Federation) (September 4)
- [Beyond distributed and decentralized: what is a federated network? Networked Cultures](networkcultures.org/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/)
- [Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?](http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf)
- [Helmond. The platformization of the web. (2015)](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305115603080)
## Privacy ? (September 25)
Lately we've been hearing some interesting critiques of "privacy as a concept and moral imperative". Let's see if we think they hame sense.
- [Lepore, Jill Privacy in an Age of Publicity](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-prism)
- Wendy Chun Talk, Right to Loiter [Mumbai women assert their right to loiter](http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/Mumbai-women-assert-their-right-to-loiter/article16898193.ece)
## Justice (October 30)
What is right matters, why go to justice (rather than...), what is fair is discernable (there is something wrong) (Social Justice, Environmental Justice, Data Justice, Design Justice)
- [Digital Justice](http://detroitdjc.org/principles/), [Design Justice](http://designjusticenetwork.org/network-principles/) principles
- Public Lab [Re-imagining the Data Lifecycle](https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/07-01-2014/reimagining-the-data-lifecycle)
- Data Together Geo Article (?)
Extra Reading:
- [Justice (SEP)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/)
# Extra Resources
## Example Syllabus / Approach
- [Reference models Open University building a reader together](https://hackmd.io/s/rkoQyQxtf): Afterword in Ramage, M., & Shipp, K. (2009). Systems Thinkers. Springer London., quoted bits
- Finn Brunton, NYU "[Hacker Culture & Politics](http://finnb.net/t/hackerculture.pdf)" : This class will study hacking by looking at technology (what hackers do), politics and law (how hackers changed both), and society (how hackers are understood).
## Academic Takes
- Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT press.
- Berry, D. M., & Galloway, A. R. (2016). A Network is a Network is a Network: Reflections on the Computational and the Societies of Control. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(4), 151-172.
- Tréguer, F. (2017). Gaps and bumps in the political history of the internet. Internet Policy Review, 6(4). (like the authors other stuff!)
- Musiani, F. (2016). Alternative technologies as alternative institutions: the case of the domain name system. In The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance (pp. 73-86). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
- Terranova, T. (2004). Chapter 2: Network Dynamics. In _Network culture: Politics for the information age_. Pluto Press.
- Raley, R. (2009). Speculative Capital. In _Tactical media (Vol. 28)_. U of Minnesota Press.
- Dourish, P. (2017). _The stuff of bits: an essay on the materialities of information_. MIT Press. (WHOLE SECTIONS ON BGP!!!!!!!!!!!)
- Anything by Lisa Nakamura? (e.g, Nakamura, L. (2013). Glitch racism: Networks as actors within vernacular internet theory. Culture Digitally, 10.)
- Maybe some Fuchs on critical media? which one??!!?!!?!